An extra-early roll-out this morning – off to the warehouse first to load up the vehicle with customer hardware, then down to Mississauga to begin work on the installation! Oh, but wait! The last missing pieces, the ones that were to have been delivered yesterday but went to the wrong address, the ones that were definately picked up yesterday afternoon and definately were there so I could get going bright and early – thos pieces? Weren’t there.

Shit. So they got screwed up again in transit but definately positively absolutely they’ll be dropped directly to the customer’s location first thing this morning. Honest. In the mean time, I get to work putting together what I do have – after all, the store’s open to the public today at noon.

You know, the company that created the POS systems, suggests that most clients will want to install the systems a week in advance of the store opening. That allows time to set things up, time for the store staff to get familiar with the systems, and time to get all the store’s products and inventory entered. Generally speaking, a week in order to get up to speed on the new gear.

So, y’know, basically what they Don’t suggest, is that you start trying to install the system for the very first time, without any prior experience, and while missing some incidental things like CASH DRAWERS and BARCODE SCANNERS with exactly 3 hours to go before the grand re-opening to the public.

And if, on top of all that, you have never set up a POS system before in your entire life, have never used a POS system, and generally speaking, you just plain don’t know much about the retail industry… well the suggestion has been floated, that someone needs to maybe go and have their sanity checked. Maybe a drug test, too.

So anyways. The last missing parts do indeed turn up, but more fun and excitement – the network cables already in place and left over from the recently departed former hardware, the network cables I was going to use – are now in use. The computer and network faeries arrived and installed some equipment that’s using those cables. Noone knows for sure what this equipment is for, if it’s needed, or what it’s doing. But what we do know for sure is, no, we may not use the extra network cables.

Wow! Super-fun-happy time! I get to make an emergency excursion to the nearest Staples and run up $250 on my credit card, to set up a router and a bunch of cables so we can get the Point of Sale system running. By noon!

The fun, it never ends. You know this is coming right? The cash drawers don’t work. Seems they sent us cash drawer cables for those printers, but they sent us these printers, and it’s not compatible.

You know, the whole situation has been going in this direction. There’s a word that describes it and that word is… our Word Of The Day:Clusterfuck!

I could even go on typing because it doesn’t end there. It just keeps going on, and on, and on some more. But I’m tired. It’s been a long day and I’ve been working really hard and having lots of stress about trying to get this up and running for them. Now I just need to rest a while.

You can probably figure out the rest of the story anyhow. It ends with the new POS system installed and more or less working (except the cash drawers) and the customer deciding not to use it right away because there’s a few things yet to be tweaked and it’s not 100% perfect.

As vacations go, so far this one bites. Goodnight.

A completely unrelated photo that has nothing to do with the current situation.